Before he was A.G. Sulzberger, the new publisher of The New York Times, he was Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the Multnomah County reporter for The Oregonian.

From 2006 to 2009, he wrote more than 300 articles on county government and public life, from the influx of homeless patrons at the library in downtown Portland to a series of articles exposing misconduct by Sheriff Bernie Giusto, reporting that ultimately helped force the longtime lawman from office.

After leaving Portland, Sulzberger held a series of reporting and editing jobs at The New York Times. In 2014, he wrote the "innovation report" that took the Times to task for failing to integrate online journalism into its work and losing influence to such upstarts as Vox, BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post.

Four years later, the Times has restructured to focus on its digital footprint and righted itself financially. The company announced Thursday that subscription revenues topped $1 billion last year, up nearly 15 percent from 2016 and handily overcoming continued decline in advertising revenue.

"I've been pretty involved with setting our digital strategy over the past few years, and one of the things that's really clear to me is that if you want people to pay you have to have something worth paying for," Sulzberger says.

The Times added 157,000 digital-only subscriptions in the last three months of the year. That growth has enabled the news organization to overcome, at least for the time being, the financial pressures squeezing other local and national media.

At the same time, however, the Times has become an object of scorn in some corners because of a perceived liberal bias. President Donald Trump leads those critics, routinely denouncing it as the "failing New York Times."

In January, Sulzberger took over the publisher job from his father and became the fifth generation of his family to lead the news organization, a lineage that began with his great-great-grandfather in 1896. The 37-year-old spoke with The Oregonian/OregonLive by phone this week to discuss what's changed in journalism, and what hasn't, and how the Times is navigating the industry's difficult financial and political landscape.

(The conversation had been edited for brevity and clarity)

Q: I've worked at several newspapers and known a bunch of publishers, and most ... have come up through the advertising side or maybe circulation. You came up solidly through the newsroom in Providence and Portland and Kansas City and New York. You've been a reporter and an editor. Is that a path you picked deliberately, as opposed to coming up on the business side?

A: I started in newsrooms because that's where my heart is. I got into journalism covering local communities. First in Providence and then obviously at The Oregonian, covering Multnomah County. And that's just the work I loved doing.

Fundamentally, I think that my newsroom background gives me a fairly different perspective on the business ... one that I think is uniquely helpful for this role of publisher specifically but also ... for the challenge of tackling business questions in media right now.

If there's one core belief that I have, that I bring into this role, it's that a newspaper, a news organization, is only as good as its journalism. I've seen that firsthand in organizations.

One of the reasons that the Times has done well in the past few years, even as our industry continues to face tremendous pressure, is that we have been obsessed with protecting the newsroom from cuts. We've continued to invest more and more in the underlying product.

What that allowed us to do, from a business perspective, is it allowed us to charge for our work online.

I've been pretty involved with setting our digital strategy over the past few years, and one of the things that's really clear to me is that if you want people to pay you have to have something worth paying for.

I think that anchor I have in the newsroom, that background, has been a north star for me throughout this process.

To me, journalism worth paying for is journalism that's original, journalism that's deeply reported and obsessively verified. It's journalism that's expert in some way, either through the background of the reporter, their presence in a place, or the experience they've had covering a story over many years.

Q: What did you take away from your time in Portland?

Arthur Sulzberger when he joined The Oregonian in 2006. Oregonian file photo

A: Specific to The Oregonian and my work as a reporter there, I'm really grateful to have had the opportunity to be a government beat reporter. Because I think it's a really important discipline. And getting to learn from really talented folks like (former reporter) Dave Austin or (former editor) Joany Carlin, approaching that work with skepticism and rigor and creativity. I just thought it was as fun a job as I could imagine.

And then having the opportunity to dig into a couple of investigative stories, like big meaty investigative stories ... with folks like Steve Engelberg (a former managing editor, now editor of ProPublica) and Les Zaitz (a former investigative reporter and editor, now publisher and editor of the Malheur Enterprise), even though I only had the opportunity to work with them for a few short months I learned more lessons than I can count.

And then more broadly, Portland has a really special place in my heart. I still make a point of trying to get out there once a year to see old friends.

Q: You're talking, I gather, to a number of local newspapers in various communities. That, and the mailbag column you did last month, tells me you want The New York Times to connect with readers all over the country.

A: That's been the case for some time. And, increasingly, we even have the aspiration to connect with readers all over the globe. There's this great number someone just put on my desk that we have subscribers in something like 195 countries, which is a pretty remarkable list. We even have one in North Korea.

So obviously we're always interested in bringing our journalism to a broader audience. But set aside strategy for a second. I just think local journalism is really, really, really important.

My experience at The Providence Journal and The Oregonian really underscored to me how critical it is in communities to have journalists. (It's important) to have reporters spending time and digging in to hold the powerful people and institutions in their communities accountable. And then, even more broadly, to create this common understanding that I believe deeply binds a community together.

Q: The New York Times has an excellent brand in New York. It has a great brand in Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, but as we've seen in the past couple years in certain parts of the country and with certain politicians, the name is kind of toxic. It's used by our president that way. Can you envision that changing?

A: After I left The Oregonian, at some point later, I was the Midwest correspondent for The Times, based in Kansas City. I covered the Great Plains states, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri. And I would sometimes, as you might expect, face skepticism.

I remember one time I walked onto a farm in South Dakota, in quite rural South Dakota, for a story. I approached the farmer and introduced myself as being from The New York Times. His response was something along the lines of, "My friends on talk radio have told me not to trust you."

And my response to him was, "When was the last time your friends on talk radio showed up at your farm in an effort to understand what you're going through at this moment?"

I really do believe that the underlying act of independent journalism is something that our society wants and needs. And in fact, I think the huge growth we've had in readership all over the country is a sign that people want independent journalism that is obsessed with supposedly old-fashioned notions like fairness and accuracy.

We're in a tough moment where a lot of people, for political expediency, are trying preemptively to discredit the Times and other great news organizations like The Washington Post, The New Yorker, CNN, in an effort to secure short-term gains for themselves.

And the reason they're doing that is because our job is to skeptically and rigorously dig into the issues that matter and follow the truth wherever it leads.

Q: Whenever somebody says that media, whether it's The Oregonian or The New York Times, comes with a left-wing bias, it's true that we come with an urban perspective. Overwhelmingly our reporters, and I'm sure yours as well, are in cities. Are there things we should be doing differently as journalists to understand the rest of the country?

A: It's a hugely important question. I feel very fortunate to have worked not just in New York City but also Rhode Island, Oregon and Kansas City, and covered a much larger swath of the country.

This is one of the reasons why diversity is so important in a news organization. Because I think it is important to make sure that there are people who reflect a wide variety of worldviews and life experiences as they dig into the stories of our time.

One of the ways that we're trying to address that very issue is we have a significantly larger percentage of reporters based around the nation rather than New York. And I think that's an important trend and one that's likely to continue.

Q: The New York Times has written prominently on the new administration, the election last year, the #MeToo movement, which came out of reporting The New York Times has done. What do you wish the paper did better?

A: I still think we can do a better job, in a way that's not jarring, in a way that always puts the story first, explaining the work that goes into pieces. I think of the word credibility a lot.

You pointed out, there's a lot of people in this country who don't trust media at all, including The New York Times. And yet for those of us who are so close to this, we know all the work and expertise and care that goes into everything that we publish. And I'm not sure that we're always conveying that to our readers in ways that feel intuitive and natural to a piece.

There was this very elegant [paragraph] in the middle of the story, in which C.J. Chivers says: I'll bet by now you're wondering why I'm writing this story about this one guy.

And then C.J. explains that he's a former Marine himself, and that over the years he's tried to help Marines that have come back from war and are struggling with its aftermath, and that somebody brought this guy's story to him, and how he called a bunch of Marines he knew and everyone vouched for him as a really good kid, and that intrigued him.

And he started digging in, and the more he dug in, the more he felt this one person's story was emblematic of a much larger trend that needed to be told.

That's the type of thing I think we should be thinking more about.

I could layer on a lot of other stuff on that list. I want to have even more people out in the country understanding the forces that are remaking America. I want to double down on our coverage of technology and the biggest technology companies – not just as a business story but as a story on how the economy's being reshaped, and how we spend our time is being reshaped.

Q: I'm going to ask you one more question, and it may be a difficult one for you. The Arthur Sulzberger I knew was a really big NBA fan. Are you still a big Knicks fan, and if you are, what do they do with their roster?

A: Oh, boy. I am still a die-hard NBA fan. And I have to say that probably the highlight of my NBA fandom was my time at The Oregonian. I was there for this remarkable period of optimism with Brandon Roy and LaMarcus Aldridge and Nic Batum and even Greg Oden was still a prospect rather than a sad case back then. And I loved that team. I could probably name the entire roster.

So yes, I am back to the Knicks for better or for worse. And it's a tough and painful affection. They never seem to love me back.

Q: Is there a path forward for the Knicks?

A: I'm encouraged by a couple things. I'm encouraged that (star forward Kristaps) Porzingis seems like a singular talent, and someone you could probably build a franchise around as long as his feet stay healthy. And I'm excited that the Knicks still have all their draft picks, which is a pretty rare thing.

Editor's note: Shortly after the interview was completed Porzingis tore his ACL, ending his season. "This is sort of tragic," Sulzberger wrote in a subsequent email. "The curse of mentioning Greg Oden?"